Freemium Game Economy Designer @ AC+A. Engineer by education, Game Developer and Jack of all trades today. I like video game development, social media, science, theatre, live music, lolcats and traveling.

Almost everything you need to know to enter mobile game development on 2013

This is a list of useful resources to help you refine, define, execute and possibly reconsider your decision to enter mobile game development this year. The resources are a little more inclined to the business and game design parts of game development, except for a couple of ones linking other lists.

The executive summary version: It is a very attractive and fast growing market, but the odds are stacked against small, new and indie game developers. Successful games are usually paid, greatly innovative and highly polished casual titles -specially when working with a good publisher or a known brand- or free to play titles that operate as a service, seeing little revenue for a span of at least six months after launch, adding new content and/or further polishing, balancing and optimizing for retention and monetization. The former approach can be a logical step for studios that already have game development expertise, a team already in place and experience working with publishers. The latter is the approach that might yield the greater rewards, but requires a mid to long term vision, and also a tight and strong combination of resources and execution speed to actually pull it off.

What is mobile game development? We’ll consider it as any game focused development for smartphones or tablets running Android or iOS. What does this market look like? Let’s look at some numbers and insights: